Libya’s crippling “proxy war” will doom the country to become “a haven for terrorists and extremists” absent support from the U.S., the interior minister for the country’s UN-backed government tells Axios.
Between the lines: The U.S officially supports the government in Tripoli, but has played no part in the current civil war beyond calls for a political solution. Meanwhile, Russian mercenaries are bolstering renegade Gen. Khalifa Haftar's offensive and dramatically changing the nature of the war, Interior Minister Fathi Bashagha told Axios Thursday evening in Washington.
...Bashagha says he began to hear reports of Russian involvement over the summer, including from locals who described groups of light-skinned people “taking the roads through the desert.”
“By August, they were on the front lines,” he says. "The tactics used by Haftar’s forces drastically changed. The operations were becoming very professional.”
Suddenly airstrikes were being conducted from higher altitudes and at night, he says. Russian snipers have also been “very effective and very harmful to our forces.”